What happened when the MoJ and Fred Sirieix opened a restaurant inside a prison

In September 2023, the MoJ’s Strategic Communications team released a pioneering documentary, ‘Served’, with ‘First Dates’ star Fred Sirieix and his charity, The Right Course. Filmed over six months, it captures HMP Lincoln's staff and prisoners working with Fred to establish a training restaurant within the prison.

The documentary is part of MoJ’s wider no-cost ‘Reducing Reoffending’ campaign aimed at improving public understanding of Government initiatives to tackle reoffending to improve confidence, with impact measured through social media impressions, engagements, PR reach and change in public perceptions.

Our key objective was to set a new MoJ record for social impressions and video views, leveraging Fred’s social footprint and hospitality network to reach a broader audience with our ‘reducing reoffending’ message. A second objective was to increase subscribers to our YouTube channel, where the documentary would be housed.

Strategy

Traditional media often overlooks the significant work being done to rehabilitate prisoners, and distrust of government communications can limit audience engagement on our channels. Alongside the powerful and authentic stories of prisoners and staff, trusted, external voices have the power to make the public more aware of work taking place to reduce reoffending.

Fred Sirieix is best known as maître d' on Channel 4’s First Dates, turning his decades-long career in Michelin-starred restaurants into nationwide popularity as the welcoming face of the hospitality industry. Many people may not know that Fred is also founder of charity The Right Course, which provides prisoners with first-class hospitality training and industry-recognised qualifications, supporting them into employment upon release and reducing the risk of reoffending.

At the time of meeting Fred’s next project was the opening of a training restaurant at HMP Lincoln, and our Campaigns team reached out to pitch a collaboration. Fred’s passion for rehabilitation and his understanding of how the criminal justice system works made him a very credible and authentic voice in this area. Combined with his celebrity status and influence in the hospitality industry, we had a winning foundation for a strategic project that amplified our key campaign messaging.

This kicked off an extensive production process unlike anything a government department had attempted before. Combining our exclusive access to film in prisons (where media has restricted access) with Fred’s social influence, we set out to create a first-of-its-kind, celebrity-led documentary for MoJ that successfully delivered our reducing reoffending messages to a wider audience.

Implementation and creativity

We pitched the creative concept to Fred’s charity, the prison, and the course participants. After reviewing our in-depth brief and strategy Fred happily agreed to lend his name, reputation and one million social followers at no-cost to support the campaign. However, the prisoners who took the most convincing. By clearly explaining our shared objectives and our commitment to telling a positive and authentic story, all parties agreed to participate.

Filming spanned 13 shoots over six months, capturing a fly-on-the-wall documentary inside a working prison with all its challenges. Situating Fred in this world required meticulous planning from the start. We captured his first interaction with the prisoners on a Zoom call and their authentic reactions to him inspiring them to continue on the course. From there, it was a case of capturing numerous scenes to show the build-up and anticipation to his arrival and the launch of the restaurant. Each shoot marked a unique event, from first service and guest chef visits to family visits and prisoner interviews.

Fred was only available to shoot with us in person on the launch day, making it crucial that our team of two videographers didn’t miss any moment on camera. It was an incredibly high-pressure and physically compact setting but led to us capturing some amazing moments. The powerful speech Fred gave to the prisoners become one of the most poignant moments of the documentary and resonated with audiences hugely on social media. Inspiring the team of seven prisoners to embrace the opportunity to demonstrate their new skills, he said: “Don’t forget, there is a stigma attached to being in prison...not everyone believes in redemption and forgiveness. It’s up to us to prove to them this is the reason we’re doing this.”

To shed light on the history of rehabilitation, and further elevate Fred’s celebrity image to our wider campaign, we filmed an interview with a leading prison historian in a disused Victorian prison. Adding a change of pace and focus, the broader prison history was woven among the real-life stories of current prisoners and Fred’s incredible charity to make for a truly heart warming story.

Results and effectiveness

We implemented a strong digital engagement strategy for the documentary’s YouTube premiere, leveraging Fred’s 1 million social media followers to reach new audiences with MoJ’s message.

We created teaser trailers for other social channels using audience segmentation learnings and mining Fred’s celebrity appeal. Over 30 social media posts were made across Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube Shorts, directing back to hero video. A collaborative Instagram post with Fred reached 110K views, tapping into new audiences for MoJ. Fred was so pleased with the video that he shared multiple additional posts and stories, quote-tweeted MoJ's posts on X and cascaded the posts to his influential hospitality network to boost engagement and extend reach.

In total, the documentary achieved over 2.5 million organic impressions and over 400K video views, making it MoJ’s most successful video ever. Fred's proactive posts were crucial in achieving these results.

Due to the organic success in the first few weeks of publishing, we subsequently launched the MoJ’s first in-house paid campaign to support originally organic content. The first burst of paid ads began in January 2024, following Fred’s appearance on ‘I’m A Celebrity’, capitalising on his increased visibility.

Alongside our Digital Marketing team, we created six-second bumper and 20-second and 40-second skippable YouTube ads, directing users to watch the full video. These were launched in two phases to our target audience segments in line with the Reducing Reoffending campaign, and we re-cut the 20 and 40-second skippable ads for the second phase to put Fred front and centre, following the success of organic A/B testing. The ads led to a 962% increase in views and a 186% increase in subscribers. Total watch time surged by 1,365%, with 93% positive or neutral sentiment. Our key objectives were not only achieved, but far surpassed.

Fred’s influence and social following were key to the documentary campaign's success and is testament to the relationships built by the production team. 'Served' has set a new standard for Whitehall comms teams to bring departmental priorities to life and collaborate with prominent voices.

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